Images from the public workshop held at the Ledge Gallery, Epcor Centre. The project is outlined in the press release below: set up a public access point about a critical site in the city and invite anyone and everyone to comment. Post the results and take the temperature of the debate.
The Calgary Herald wrote about it here.
Leah Sandals in Toronto blogged it here.
The project:
Recent narratives around the Cecil have predominantly been negative, focusing on it as a site of criminal activity, of contagious poverty, a blackhole of property value and roadblock to urban growth and development.
The Cecil figures heavily, if counterproductively, in the development visions of the East Village. Unlike its more venerated siblings, the King Edward Hotel or the St. Louis Hotel, Cecil doesn't offer much to counter its dark past to make it an appealing addition to this development campaign.
Are there other dialogues that could be initiated around this space? Recognizing that change will have to happen, are there other futures for the Cecil, besides the proverbial parking lot?
This Is My Cecil continues a project developed through the City of Calgary’s 'This is my City' initiative, where artists work in mentoring capacity with Calgarians accessing the shelter system in Calgary. In the fall of 2009, A series of zine-making workshops were held at the Drop In Shelter, inviting participants to build their own narratives from, and in response to, media narratives about the Cecil.
A second installment of this project was developed as an open source project at the Epcor Centre for the Arts’ Ledge Gallery Space in May 2010. In this incarnation, This is My Cecil provides a social space that emulates the hotel bar of the Cecil. Iconic elements of this bar were installed in the Ledge Gallery, and the space is open Monday to Friday 5- 8 p.m. for visitors to come in and participate in zine-making workshops, discussions and other research into the Cecil space.
S White. Cecil Hotel, Calgary. 1982
by Tomas Jonsson
The stabbing death of Derrick Lee Fourhorns at the Cecil Hotel in Calgary on October 12, 2008 threw into sharp relief long standing tensions about the building’s troubled legacy and calls for its closure. In the months that followed, the exploits in and around the Cecil were a consistent feature in the news; The open sale of crack cocaine, beatings, knifings, the regular visits by police as many as five times per day. Following a year-long monitoring and gathering evidence of the criminal activity by the police, the Cecil was deemed to be a threat to public safety, its business licence was removed, and the building put up for sale.
The City of Calgary took possession of the building on February 14, trumping the neighbouring Drop In Centre’s bid. Ward Alderman Druh Farrell justified the $10.9 million purchase as a key component to the revitalization of the East Village of Calgary. “I feel comfortable with this building coming down. In fact, I’d like to be the first to deliver a blow,” she said. “It’s a very strategic site that has been underutilized and, frankly, a blight and it has a more important role to play and a more positive role to play in that community.”
The question of the Cecil’s future is inextricably tied to its location. The building sits on the corner of 4th street and MacLeod Trail, a few blocks north of City Hall, and down the street from the Drop In Centre. A little further east leads to the banks of the Bow River. A network of roads, and a flyover expressway, provide commuter access to the city, and also bifurcate the land in this area.
The Cecil is one of an assortment of single room occupancy (SRO) hotels located in the East Village. Built in the early years in the city, these hotels catered primarily to itinerate workers. The relatively affordable rents and flexibility, particularly during scaling back of national housing supports in the Chretien era provided a convenient short to long term housing solution for poor and precarious tenants. SROs become particularly appealing sites for appropriation. At the same time, their engagement with the street and the character of built form, along with their central location make them appealing candidates and vehicles for gentrification.
The King Edward Hotel was purchased by the City of Calgary in 2004, when the building was condemned due to mould and other structural deficiencies. The physical site was an integral component of a plan to correct urban blight that characterised the East Village. This plan would have seen the 100 year old structure replaced with a connector road along forth street, to improve access to the downtown core.
A groundswell of local support which centred around the King Eddy’s (as it was affectionally known) recent history as a premiere blues bar crystalised into a coordinated effort to preserve the building. Council decision was swayed by the effort, and the building was successfully integrated into the narrative of the East Village. The King Eddy was purchased by the Cantos Music Society and massive structural renovations were undertaken to restyle it as a concert venue and museum. At a street festival on October 17, 2008, honoring the revitalised King Eddy, Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) CEO Chris Ollenberger praised the Building as “another example of how we are transforming the East Village into a mixed-use, vibrant, inner-city community.’
The St. Louis Hotel shares a similarly rich living memory. It was here that according to local mythology Ralph Klein first made his decision to enter politics, and where his ‘shadow cabinet’ would meet. The St. Louis had a cache because it attracted downtown office crowd, and so appealed to a broader community, while still providing housing.
Unlike the King Eddy and St. Louis, which were able to leverage aspects of their living memory into new conceptualisations of the area, the living memory of the Cecil is as a criminal space. Although once described by owner Sam Silberman as a blue-collar hotel where everyone is equal, it had since lost control to criminal activities through fear, intimidation and perseverance. It’s ‘shoebox’ quality and filled in windows made the building almost impervious to light, and perhaps as a result more concusive to illicit activity. The Cecil became a sounding board for inner city problems.
The Cecil is a contested site, both in its physical site and surrounding, as well as in discourses in the city. It’s rough reality at odds with conceptual framings of development proposals. For developers, the central location near the riverfront and the downtown core is a desireable site of investment. Visions for this area that include urban, upscale living and retail, along with the significant potential for property taxes that development would bring make alternative visions of affordable housing and service provision a difficult fit.
The Cecil is located at the outer edge of what is defined as the East Village. Here, the largely residential community gradually declined due to years of speculation of expansion of the Calgary Stampede grounds. This, coupled with city plans that negatively identified the area deterred any sustained investment for development or maintainance, and the contributed to the loss of amenities required to support residential development, including grocery stores, corner stores and small retail businesses. The final houses were cleared in 2007 in order for Stampede expansion to occur in earnest.
The relatively stable economic boom fuelled a renewed effort by the city and private developers to imagine and implement a plan, under the thematic expression of ‘The Rivers’. The Calgary Municipal Land Claims Corporation was established in 2007 to provide an indepedant arms length body specifically mandated to implement a plan for the Rivers District neighbourhood revitalisation; to ‘bring the city’s most neglected neighbourhood to life and make it part of the city again.’
The narrative of this development plan offers a corrective to the current social environment, ‘one of homelessness and perceived lawlessness’ and promises to ‘turn a blighted, crime-ridden inner city area into a desirable, sustainable community once again’. It promises to transform it from “A place where residents living in high-rises didn’t venture too far out their doors after dark because of undesirables lurking in shadows, or street people huddled in doorways for shelter, and with nowhere to go even if they did go out.”
While there is no specific plan for the Cecil by the city, the purchase brought the site into alignment with the city’s plan for East Village development. Ollenberger said there are a number of structures that would make sense. “I can see a parkade working there quite well, there is a jam in the area... Whether the building stays or goes, it’s really the use that’s a problem...We do need to find a new use for the site that’ll be more compatible for the intended long-term future.”
The Cecil was problematic and far from the healthiest of places to be living. But the overwhelming emphasis was on stopping crime without adequate consideration of the root causes. As local housing activist Grant Neufeld notes, to be serious about stopping crime, it is integral to recognize the collary effects of poverty. Rather than using resources towards reactive strategies, such as increasing police presence, Neufeld argues for a greater emphasis on policy that would focus on root solutions, such as increased affordable housing provision and infrastructure supports for people living in poverty.
“The situation is frustrating in that there wasn’t an alternative in place first.” To Neufeld, this is a similar situation to the decades-long drain on the nearby Victoria Park community. Here, there was no coordinated plan to address the housing needs of people pushed out as a result of the disinvestment that precluded the push for revitalisation. Instead, the stress fell to service organizations and social agencies.The community and property owners stopped taking care of buildings knowing that they were to be bought out.
In the case of the Cecil, the closure put an immediate strain on the surround communities. While initially applauding the city purchase and plans to tear it down, Louise Gallagher of the Drop In Centre noted that although the closure of the tavern the area did make the area safer, it hasn’t erased the once rampant and other criminal activity, simply pushed it around. An immediate outcome of the closure was the sudden spike of users of the Drop In Centres facilities and services, as well as an attempt by drug dealers to operate in and around the centre.. This lead to the Centre adopting a zero tolerance policy for drug use and possession, as well as intensified screening measures for anyone entering the centre.
Understanding the root causes of this situation requires moving the dialogue beyond immediate context to an understanding of the factors that created this circumstance.Recently cities have taken steps to address this. Like other municipalities Calgary has adopted a 10 year plan to end homelessness. This plan proposes integrating social social services and affordable housing with revitalization projects.
Debate has largely focused on what the city of affluence will do about and for the city of addiction and poverty. If both are products of the same sets of forces, is it possible to change one without changing the other? Is it possible to ‘improve’ the neighbourhood without acknowledging the divide that slices across the social fabric of the city?”
Writing on the context of Vancouver’s lower East Side, Sommers and Blomley identify a troubling rhetoric of pathology, that, bridges “the body of the urban outcast and the social body of the city.” The neighbourhood is seen as a cause of the problems that afflict it, and a threat to the rest of the city. The people who inhabit them, particularly the poor and drug addicted are not only victims, but also agents of this affliction and can infect other parts of the city.
Retaking the city for the middle class involves a lot more than simply providing gentrified housing. Third-wave gentrification has evolved into a vehicle for transforming whole areas into new landscape complexes that pioneer a comprehensive class-inflected urban remake. These new landscape complexes now integrate housing with shopping, restaurants, cultural facilities, employment opportunities – whole new complexes of recreation, consumption, production and pleasure, as well as residence.
The discussion has intensified along with the resurgence of plans for the east village development but as the case of the King Eddy has demonstrated, the role of the public and media are very important. Blomley notes that ‘narratives are pivotal because they provide analytical frameworks through which the situation can be parsed and judged, support mobilized, decisions made, and policies formulated.’
Photographer George Webber had the opportunity to document the interior of the hotel in the months,-and then again on the day- prior to its closure, providing a glimpse of the human element of the hotel behind the heated criminal rhetoric in media representation. Likewise, a revised Historic Resources Evaluation of the building provided a more nuanced view of the Hotel’s history. In addition to its role as a working man's hotel during Calgary's first economic boom, the Cecil also housed Calgary’s German language newspaper Der Deutsch-Canadier from 1911-1914, and a mixed variety of store front businesses. Heritage Planner David Plouffe notes that more than this rich history, it is the lived memory of the space which carries the most symbolic importance.
It is clear that the Cecil needs to change, but what the nature of that change can be is still a matter of debate. As a city-owned asset, all citizens own it, and have the right to present their ideas on the site and related issues. A proposal for the Cecil that embraces the complexities of the site and takes up difficult discussions is neccesary to truly understand the lived use, and what this entails. Rather than paving over, excising its recent past, the Cecil can instead work as a conduit to take this up and work through the troubled legacy of Calgary’s development and identity.
references:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2008/10/17/cecil-stabbing.html
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2008/12/15/cgy-cecil-sold.html
http://www.straight.com/article-120336/chretien-dodges-any-blame-for-homeless
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2008/17/c6967.html
http://www.calgary.ca/docgallery/bu/corporateproperties/eastcoreproposal.pdf
ibid
City turns up heat on Cecil Hotel, Kim Guttormson. Calgary Herald Monday, September 15, 2008
Grant Neufeld, personal communication
Lousie Gallagher, personal communication
http://www.calgary.ca/DocGallery/BU/planning/pdf/centre_city/centre_city_implementation/centre_city_congress_comment_results.pdf
Sommers, Jeff and Nick Blomley. “The worst block in Vancouver” in Stan Douglas, Every Building on 100 West Hastings. Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver. 2002 p.53
Sommers and Blomley p.54
Hotel Cecil Evaluation Form, City of Calgary Heritage Authority December 2008.
David Plouffe, personal communication
